


I See A Darkness

by roseandtiger



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: M/M, death and ruin and ruminations
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-05
Updated: 2016-11-05
Packaged: 2018-08-29 03:30:39
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8473726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/roseandtiger/pseuds/roseandtiger
Summary: The day dawns after all.(Chapter 84 compliant)





	

The day dawns after all.  


Like a bruise, the sky reveals itself in blues and purples and when the sun peeks through the horizon, it floods the room red. A bird lands on the window sill, tilting its head, bobbing on its spindly legs. It doesn’t sing, which is why Levi does not throw his blades at it. Inside,  dust hangs in the air, suspended. On the floor, at the foot of the bed, Levi observes these small intrusions. Time has ruthlessly moved forward again.

All day yesterday the sky had been darkening until night came the blackest it had ever been, unlit and silent, heavy with bloated clouds and greasy smoke. Light feels all wrong now; it does not belong. Day and night have somehow gotten mixed up because it should still be dark. A thin sheet of mist still hovers low on the ground.

Levi’s eyeballs hurt, and when he blinks they burn. Daylight is unmerciful in its crispness. At night the lump on the bed was undefined,  no different than the times he’d seen the man asleep. If he reached over to touch him now, would he feel the same?  
  
No. The heat would give it away. The lack of it. The coldness of death is different from the cold of winter. Even frostbite has nothing on it; it is a coldness that comes from the inside, like skin that has been stretched over stone. It leaves no room for doubt.

Can he bear to look now in the sunlight? A few times during the night he dozed off only for the drooping of his own head to wake him, and in those fractions of moments, he forgot that Erwin no longer breathed. Woke expecting Erwin to mobilize the troops, and for two or three heartbeats before his memory caught up, nothing had changed. Erwin even usually slept with his face covered, either with an arm or a blanket. When his headaches became severe enough, he’d needed absolute darkness to sleep.

But Erwin will not give orders today. The thought brings a lurch of momentary weightlessness, same as stepping on unstable ground, like earth caving in beneath him. There is a hole in Levi’s chest. Erwin has already been replaced.

He recalls Hanji’s resignation, the heavy lidded face of exhaustion, the way her lip quivered. Hanji, who has been pushed forward now to front what comes next. She’ll have to be the one to mobilize what is left of them. It surely cannot be him -- Levi isn’t sure how much of himself is left, how much of him didn’t evaporate in red steam like the Colossal. Maybe after every time he has to put himself together again, more of him is lost and less of him remains.

A soft breeze comes in through the window, which Levi had opened in the night. It is a soft sigh against his brow. It disturbs the flowers Arlert had brought in, silent and timid as he entered, like he would have been unwelcome in the room they’d laid Erwin. To be truthful, Levi had not looked at him, he’d left as silently as he had entered.

Looking at them now, Levi can see veins splayed inside their pale petals, made distinct by the sunlight filtering through them. These feeble and delicate things are a laughably inadequate tribute to the man who single-handedly overthrew kings and felled giants. But Levi didn’t know what to place either. Nothing. What did it matter? Flowers change nothing about death. Death is the deterioration of bodies, the erasure of faces. Sometimes, it leaves no proof that one lived at all.

Erwin had sometimes told him stories, morbid things he’d read in heretical books he said. He always phrased them in a way that did not make it clear whether he believed them or not. _What do you think?_ he would ask Levi. Levi seldom asked him back.

One comes to him now, the story of an idiot who’d supposedly ventured into the underworld to get back the woman he loved, only to lose her right before the end on their way back to the living. All because of his impatience, his stupid inability to trust and wait until the end; how stupidly greedy that man was, Levi had said, not waiting until the end was reached. He remembers the clear, rolling laughter his condemnation had drawn from Erwin. And later, when  it had slowly morphed into a strange, melancholy smile that settled in Levi’s chest like a ball of lead. “You’re right.” Erwin had said in the end.  
  
He hadn’t been though. Erwin’s stories from his past had been few and far between, small pieces that Levi snatched here and there and patched together with his own in his head, often made whole cloth. He thinks now of all of Erwin’s untold stories -- how many are locked forever in his skull, buried deep down never to be disturbed? There are a million things Levi never asked about for fear of prying, not wanting to overreach and cross boundaries he had no way to navigate. He’d been stupid.

There is a knock at the door.

“Levi?” Hanji’s voice is hoarse. ”We have to go soon.”  
  
He nods, too tired to even lift his eyes up again. Hanji lingers in the doorway for some time, but leaves without saying anything more. She’s good with people despite what she thinks. If Levi were to go, she’d take care of it all. Erwin had chosen well, which is what Erwin did.  
  
He turns from his spot on the floor to look at the man one more time. But the lifeless corpse is no more Erwin than the bed he lies on or the commode next to it. He still cannot reconcile the two, the broad-backed man who towered over him and this body that Levi now towers over.

There is shuffling outside the door, the hurried thump thump of light feet. They sound like brats -- all of them children. How did it come to this, with only he and Hanji left to shepherd them? It should be Erwin here, or even Mike. It should be someone whose gaze could pierce through the mist to see the other end, to sniff the air. And yet it was Levi that remained, he who was a sword in the dark; Erwin pointed and Levi went. What was he supposed to do now? Where would he go?

He’ll need to get up first, leave this room. _This tomb_ , he corrects.  He hasn’t left it since he carried Erwin’s body inside, with every step memorizing a weight he would never feel again. He hadn’t felt heavy despite being a giant and completely dead weight. Hanji had helped, the only one who’d offered and the only one he’d let. 

_Erwin will be left behind now._ When he draws breath it sounds like rotten woodwork shaking in the wind. _Erwin will be left behind_. He repeats the words inside his mind, tests them against himself, rolls them silently in his mouth, morbid curiosity like tonguing inflamed flesh, at once painful and itchy. Or is Levi the one who has fallen behind?

And then he’s realizing, with a whirling suddenness, that he’s never been outside without Erwin. When Levi had, blinking, stepped outside to see open skies, it had been with Erwin. Because of Erwin. It knocks the breath right out of him like he’s been kneed in the stomach, the thought of the void outside this room. Erwin’s corpse cushions him still, keeps him from fully absorbing the impact of that thought. Isn’t that funny, he thinks, and something of an aborted laugh makes it past his throat, but it’s more of a gasp and a croak, more like he’s choking on his own spit like a baby. It’s really not funny at all.  He wonders if it will feel different, if the air will smell different, if the ground will tilt beneath his feet.

He rises and the room does tilt, and green spots crowd his vision. His stiff muscles protest all the way to Erwin’s bed. He sits with his hip touching Erwin’s arm, careful not to jostle him, gentle as a bird. This is the last time. Then he will rise.

But it’s like the air has become scarcer and Levi has trouble filling lungs that have become bottomless, air just doesn’t go in all the way, he can’t get a deep enough breath. His hand comes up, but it has no direction and so he lets it to fall upon Erwin’s own where it rests on his breast, frozen in eternal salute like a statue. It’s the exhaustion that descends on him in a spiral, it’s the dizziness that overtakes him for a moment, and his head falls on Erwin’s chest as well. Distantly he’s aware of his thumb rubbing circles on the other’s hand like he never allowed himself in life, but he can’t rub any warmth in now.

”Erwin…” he begins, but words slip away before he can give them shape in his mouth. The silence in reply is deafening.

His hand trails up Erwin’s arm, up his shoulder, to his throat, then his jaw, before finally resting on his cheek. All of Erwin is cold underneath the cloak and Levi means to pull his hand away, means to rise and walk out the door this time, finally say goodbye, but Erwin’s coldness has seeped into his own hand and weighed it down.

“Erwin” he whispers again, unable to resist, to hear again the resounding silence in answer. And then he can’t stop it, can’t keep himself from probing the emptiness. Erwin’s name falls like rain in abandoned wells, echoes in the emptiness. No matter how hard he strains there is no answer.

All night he has been saying goodbye. An impossible task. For a moment, a heartbeat, he thinks that Erwin cannot ask this of him. Then he remembers, catching up to reality, that Erwin never did. That it was him, it was all him.

He’s still there, draped over Erwin’s body when Hanji comes back. A hand on his shoulder rouses him from a hazy film of sleep that he does not recall falling into.  Hanji calls his name but he still can’t look up. He can’t lift his eyes, the lids are weighed down. _Coins for the ferried dead_ , Erwin’s voice whispers in his mind.

She pulls him away in the end, rights him, nudges him out gently, like a deer nosing its young. He can’t really muster the energy to fight the separation.  
  
Once, a lifetime ago when he was a kid at a time when he held up his pants with rope, he’d seen a woman give birth to a blue mound of flesh with bulging eyes, a slimy cord wrapped twice around its neck. Thing was dead before its first breath, and Levi remembers neither their names nor their faces exactly,  but that image is seared into his brain and is still alive even with the horrors of titans crowding his mind. At the door, struggling to draw breath, Levi feels strangely affected by this memory, like some phantom cord has wrapped itself around his own throat to squeeze. 

Hanji leads him outside. He has no illusions that he’s concealed the rattling breath in his chest, but he goes. One foot in front of the other, he follows. Together they move forward. They’re all bound to their stations, he and Hanji, the sun, the wind, all bound to invisible courses, ever-moving, seemingly forward but really in circles.

  
“I’m going after the Beast Titan” he says as soon as they’re out and he’s shut the door.

Hanji is not happy with that, but her face tells him that she expected this. Through the window he can see the others inside the house moving about like ghosts.

“I’ll have to punish them.” Hanji says eventually, following his gaze. At first, he is thrown, unable to connect the words to sense. And then he does.  
  
“What could possibly be the point?”  
  
“Mikasa held a blade to your neck, Levi. They tried to take the serum by force.” Her face is hard, her one eye sharp and birdlike. Too much _Commander_ in her already and Levi can hardly stand it.

“How many of us are left, nine? And you want to, what, ground a third of our force?” He snorts, “do whatever you want, but it won’t do shit.”

  
Then, “I was the one who let Erwin die” he adds, turning to walk away. 

But Hanji follows, not dropping it this time. “Why _did_ you do that? I thought you would never --”  
  
He stops so abruptly that Hanji bumps into him. Levi’s mouth is twisted in a grimace when he turns, but it opens only to close again, unable to sound words.  
  
“Erwin was our only chance and you know it, Levi. You know it.” she says again with her remaining eye fixed on him, a wet shine. “Even if no one else liked him for it.”

“That what you think? Think I give a shit about what anyone else thinks of him?” Anger makes his voice hoarser, harsher than he means it to be. “I don’t.”

He forces himself to take a breath. Then another. He does this sometimes, takes out his anger on others wherever he can find an opening. A fight outside his door? Break it up with a knee. Hanji does not deserve that. It is he who’s changed everything for them. His eyes slide back to the house, where he can see Arlert looking at them through the glass. The glare is obscuring his face. Levi looks away, not wanting him to see, not wanting to see.  
  
Levi is not known for his tact, he will take the most efficient route from point A to point B, he is abrasive and while many scurry away in his presence, he does not want Hanji to be one of them. He remembers her words on the roof, the endless string of goodbyes and decides right there where they stand that the truth is too cruel to voice. He won’t tell her that it’s not worth it. That he and the rest inside the house, the ones in the walls, or any outside of them, humanity, were not worth Erwin’s suffering.  
  
“In the end he chose to die as one of us” Levi says instead, and it is no less true. “We had no right to change that.”

And that’s that. 

It isn’t until the day after next that he and Hanji have a chance to be alone again. After the basement, after coming back without their Commander, Hanji and he spend thirteen hours in a stuffy room discussing everything they’d found, the truth Erwin lived and died for, but never got to see, until Dawk roughly tells them all to break it up and get some sleep. He’d been largely silent after news of Erwin’s death, but Levi has no sympathy left to give. The prick can live with his regrets. 

And so it is in the middle of the night that he finds himself unable to sleep despite his exhaustion. Having nowhere else to go, he scales to the top of the wall and sits on the edge with his feet dangling above the sprawling vastness that opens up in front of him. He returns to the truths he now knows -- the world that lies beyond the walls, even bigger than he could have ever imagined. And yet, Levi finds himself unchanged by the revelations. There is a sameness clinging to the world. Well, Levi had never sought truth, so maybe the answers he finds himself holding now are like someone else’s clothes, useless mismatches to questions that were never his own.

Hanji finds him there and doesn’t ask why he’s come out.  The reason is likely the same for both.

“Are you staying with us, Levi?” she asks, which truthfully he hadn’t expected, nor considered. Where else would he go? It must show on his face because Hanji says “You don’t follow me, and I doubt that you follow humanity.”

  
And a part of him wants to deny it even now, but what could possibly be the point? His choice on the roof does invite a considerable amount of doubt. The answer comes easily -- he never really thought of leaving them. Would never leave _Hanji_ like this.

Hanji smiles when he says so, eye brimming with emotion before her lips curl into something somewhat of a playful smile. “I knew that, of course,” she says, “but I need official confirmation these days.” She seems to sober up after that.

“What about after?” she says.  
  
“After what?”

“The Beast Titan.”

Levi answers as honestly as he can this time. “I might not make it to after.”

And then there are no words for a long while. They sit together, arms brushing, wind tangling their hair. Hanji looks up as a patch of clear bright stars peek through an opening in the clouded sky. If he were a different kind of man, if he were Erwin, he’d find beauty in it, his heart would swell two sizes too big, but he’s not and it can’t hold his gaze. Levi looks forward, straight ahead, into the shifting darkness.

It is he who breaks the silence.  “Hey Three-Eyes, since I might not get to say this later, you should know now.” He doesn’t look at her when he says it. He never does in these moments, eyes are distracting that way, but he can feel Hanji watching him. “It has been an honour. Always.” A beat, and then he’s quickly rising to his feet. When he finally looks down again, Hanji’s got a glimmer in her eye.  
  
“You look so uncomfortable right now” she says, laughing at him.  
  
“Shut up.”  
  
He is about to launch his wires to descend when Hanji calls his name again. She doesn’t speak until she’s sure he’s looking right at her.  
  
“Same here” she says.

  
It’s as close to a goodbye as they’ll get. 

**Author's Note:**

> I was listening to [this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4iV4NwSbscg) when I was writing, even though I think it fits Erwin far more than Levi. Which I guess makes sense since this was a way to mourn our favourite Commander's passing. 
> 
> As always, thank you for reading.  
> There's a part of me that wishes that Levi had been a little more selfish, that he had chosen differently. But I love that he let his heart choose in that moment, even if I must cry buckets for it. :/  
> Out there, there's an alternate universe where Isayama does not kill Erwin and instead starts a spin-off called _Eruri on Titan_.


End file.
